Peyroux made her name by channelling the sultry sensuality and soul of Billie Holiday and breathing new life into well-known songs written by others - notably Elliott Smith and Leonard Cohen.She still brings enchantment to covers, but has increasingly found her own distinctive voice, without losing that element of sensual magic - those long drawn-out notes - inherited from the great Lady Day.

“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring.

It’s hard to know who to write about when reviewing a new Gorillaz release. According to the official line, the band have shorn their usual guests to focus on the core creative team: vocalist 2D, drummer Russell, guitarist Noodle, and new bassist Ace, borrowed from The Powerpuff Girls.

Lindsey Jordan was 16 when she released her first EP as Snail Mail on her local punk label Sister Polygon Records. Two years later, she has graduated from high school and signed to Matador Records, home of Stephen Malkmus, Kurt Vile and Helium. Lush is Jordan’s debut full-length album, which she describes as being “more deliberate” than her previous work.

Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps).

Playwright Joe Penhall and the music biz? Well, they have history. When he was writing the book for Sunny Afternoon, his 2014 hit musical about the Kinks, he had a few run-ins with Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer.

Since releasing their first record, Bingo Masters Breakout, Mark E Smith (b 1957) has led The Fall through some of rock music’s most extreme and enthralling terrain, cutting a lyrical and musical swathe that few other artists can match. An outsider, self-confessed renegade, and microphone-destroying magus, Smith has seen dozens if not hundreds of musicians pass through the ranks of The Fall over the last 34 years.

Albert Hammond might not be a household name but he's still, undeniably, one of the world's greatest living songwriters. His songs have sold 360 million copies, ranging from Starship's soft-rock classic "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" to Julio Iglesias' "To All the Girls I've Loved Before".

Peter Perrett is one of the most underrated songwriters. If people have heard of him, it’s down to The Only Ones’ classic, “Another Girl, Another Planet”, but The Only Ones made three albums (and an odds’n’ends collection) as the Seventies turned to the Eighties, all peppered with gems. Perrett also surfaced in the mid-Nineties as The One, with another album, Woke Up Sticky. However, since then, despite multiple false starts and an Only Ones reunion (teasing fans with unreleased new song “Black Operations”), there’s been no sign of new material until now.

Perrett’s career was famously derailed by drug use but, in his mid-sixties, he’s finally clean. Accompanied by his sons, Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), he’s relaunching, and has a sturdy independent, Domino, behind him. The cheering news is that How The West Was Won is a good album, if not a great one. Much of it is, appropriately, devoted to loss and regret and, especially, his feelings for his wife, Xena, his partner in crime through thick and thin since they ran away together as teenagers.

“Epic Story” and “C Voyeurger” are heart-on-sleeve, almost teenage-sounding gushes of love, containing heart-wrenching contrition. He stares mortality in the face with a shrug on “Sweet Endeavour”, while “Hard to Say No” and “Something in My Brain” lay out wryly observed perspectives on addiction. The title track is incongruous but rather good, a wordy jam taking a poke at American cultural and imperial dominance (“We started out as a beacon of hope/But the dream of liberty quickly turned into a joke/The Indians and Mexicans were the first to feel the rope”). Jamie Perrett learnt guitar at the knee of Only Ones virtuoso John Perry, and he musters impressive work on the six-and-a-half minute “Troika” and others.

It’s an album that shows Peter Perrett’s unique voice on fine form, and his lyrical abilities undiminished since his prime. The shortfall is in memorable tunes, with only moving closer “Take Me Home” up there with his very greatest work. But that is, admittedly, a ridiculously high benchmark. As he sings, “At least I’m now capable of one last defiant breath,” I can only hope he has many more than that. There’s energized creativity here and it’s great to have him back.

• More New Music Reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for Peter Perrett "How The West Was Won"

In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.